You Bet Your Career.

It’s a dirty little secret that this is the time of year that a lot of things start to shake loose. The end of the year means that year end compensation checks come through, and those who’ve been thinking about making a job change are likely to start moving in the next 4-6 weeks. While this is by no means the only period of intensive recruiting, interviewing and hiring – it’s a year-round phenomenon – it’s certainly peak season.

While I have an iron-clad rule against ever sourcing talent (recruiters: sorry, don’t even ask), I do get a lot of calls from sellers and sales leaders thinking about their next career move. Since I end up giving the same advice, I’m putting it out into the public sphere via this post.

We’ll be hosting the first Seller Forum of 2015 – featuring special video content – on Wednesday night March 11th and Thursday March 12th in New York. If you’re a CRO, EVP, SVP or VP of sales with national, North American or global responsibility, you need to be in that room. We’ll have a heavy focus on all things video this time, with plenty of other great content and discussion around industry news, financial visibility and lots more. Request your invitation today.

Rule #1: Find Your North Star. Job candidates often find themselves in full response mode, and end up comparing one potential offer to another. Instead, write out the specs for your perfect job, right down to how much you want to travel, what kind of meetings you want to be having, and what kind of brands and agencies you want to call on. Now start measuring your options based on their distance from your ideal.

Rule #2: Stand in the Rain. If you want to get wet… First ask whether the space you’ll be entering is growing or contracting. Will this be bigger and wealthier in three years than it is now? A growing market forgives a lot of sins. No matter how good you are, musical chairs has lousy odds.

Rule #3: Don’t Bet on the Business Plan. Like battle plans, business plans get torn up as soon as the shooting starts. While you’re interviewing, subtly probe on how the company developed the assumptions in the plan. You should be looking at the quality of their processes, as you’ll end up living with them from this point on.

Rule #4: Look Past ‘Smart.’ Everyone loves to tell me how smart the people running the company are. Paraphrasing the late James Gandolfini in Zero Dark Thirty, “It’s the internet. We’re all smart. What else?” Are they wise? Generous? Patient? Will they make the right decisions when things go sideways? Remember that you are interviewing them, not just the other way around. Management and leadership are not going to suddenly get better and more virtuous after you’re hired. Take a clear eyed look now.

Above all, start thinking of your career as a narrative… a story of someone who’s getting wiser and more valuable as time passes. Will this next move be a chapter that fits?

Having recently joined an aggressively growing, global Ad Tech firm, with bright people and an intuitive and promising roadmap, I feel reinvigorated. Not to say that the product is perfect, or the processes in place flawless, everyone is driven to continuously improve. And we’re slaying the big, and the complacent. With savvy clients singing our praises.

But as the year end came and went, the offers are flowing in. And in the current environment, it only makes sense to do your due diligence, and ask these questions. The grass always seems greener, but you also have to ask yourself if… are you enjoying yourself? And secondly, do you feel like you, as an individual, can make a significant impact on the company and its success? Weather it’s been a global agency, publisher or tech firm…these, along with a close team, are the things that turn me on.